“I want you to realize some things about yourself. I want you to reflect on your life. I want you to be aware of all the terrible things you have done. I want you to face the disaster that is Bret Easton Ellis.”
“You’re murdering people and you’re telling me—”
“How can I murder people if I’m not real, Bret?” The voice was grinning. It was presenting a mystery. “Again, you are lost,” the voice sighed. “Again, Bret doesn’t get it.”
“If you ever come near my family I’ll kill you.”
“I’m not particularly interested in your family. Besides, I don’t think you’ve figured out a way to get rid of me, not yet.”
“If you’re not real, how am I going to accomplish that?”
“Did you read the manuscript?” the voice asked again.
I was on the verge of tears. I shoved a fist into my mouth and I was biting on it.
“Let’s play a game, Bret.”
“I’m not—”
“The game is called ‘Guess Who’s Next?’ ”
“You’re not alive.”
And then, suddenly and very sweetly, the voice began humming a song I recognized—“The Sunny Side of the Street”—before a roar overtook the humming and the line clicked dead.
When I laid the phone back on the desk I noticed a bottle of vodka that had not been there when I walked into the room.
The writer did not need to tell me to drink it.
24. the darkness
There is really no other way of describing the events that took place in 307 Elsinore Lane during the early morning of November 6 other than simply relating the facts. The writer wanted this job, but I dissuaded him. The following account doesn’t require the embellishments the writer would have insisted on.
Sometime around 2:15 Robby had a nightmare from which he awoke.
At 2:25 Robby heard “the sounds” of something in the house.
Robby assumed it was me until he heard the scratching at his door, and then he assumed it was Victor. (Later Robby would admit he had “hoped” it was Victor because he somehow knew “it wasn’t.”)
Robby decided to move through the bathroom into his sister’s room (according to his account, she was seemingly involved in her own nightmare) where he opened Sarah’s door and looked out into the hallway so he could see what was causing the scratching noises and leaving the deep grooves in the lower right-hand corner of his door. (At one point, Robby said, he feared he was dreaming all this.)
Robby didn’t see anything when he peered from his sister’s door and down the hallway.
(Note: The sconces in the hallway were flickering, and according to Robby this was something he had noticed before, as I had, though neither Jayne nor Sarah—nor Rosa nor Marta, for that matter—had seen it.)
Robby did, however, hear something as he stepped from his sister’s room and into the flickering hallway. There was a “rustling” sound farther down the corridor.
At this point, Robby realized something was coming up the stairs.
“It” was “breathing raggedly” and, according to Robby, “it” was also “mewling”—a word I had never heard before. (Dictionary definition: “to cry, as a baby, young child, or the like; whimper.”)
The “thing” noticed Robby’s presence and, because of this, suddenly stopped advancing up the staircase.
Robby turned away—panicking—and walked quietly in the opposite direction, toward the master bedroom at the end of the hall.
What happened when he opened the door and stepped into the room?
The room was dark. I was lying on my back in bed. I believed I was dreaming. I had passed out after drinking half the bottle of vodka that had appeared on my desk while I was talking to whom I thought was Clayton, the boy who wanted to be Patrick Bateman. When I slowly became aware that I was no longer sleeping, my eyes remained closed and I felt a pressure on my chest. I was still swirling up from a dream in which crows were turning into seagulls.
“Dad?” This was an echo.
I couldn’t open my eyes. (If I had, I would have seen Robby silhouetted in the doorway, backlit by the flickering hallway behind him.) “What is it?” my voice rasped out.
“Dad, I think there’s someone in the house.”
Robby was trying not to whine, but even drunk I could detect the fear in his voice.
I cleared my throat, my eyes still closed. “What do you mean?”
“There’s I think there’s something coming up the stairs,” he said. “There was something scratching at my door.”
According to Robby, I actually said the following: “I’m sure it’s nothing. Just go back to sleep.”
Robby countered with “I can’t, Dad. I’m scared.”
My first reaction:
I could hear Robby moving closer, stepping through the darkness of the master bedroom. I could hear him nearing me as he made his way toward my black and shapeless form.
The weight shifted on my chest again.
Robby was speaking into the darkness: “Dad, I think there’s somebody in the house.”
Robby was reaching for the bedside lamp.
Robby turned on the lamp.
Behind my closed eyelids an orange light burned.
Robby was silenced by something.
He was contemplating what he was looking at.
The image he was contemplating momentarily knocked the fear away and was replaced by an awful curiosity.
His silence was rousing me from my inebriation.
The weight shifted on my chest again.
“Dad,” Robby said quietly.
“Robby,” I sighed.
“Dad, there’s something on you.”
I opened my eyes but couldn’t focus.
What I saw next happened very quickly.
The Terby was on my chest, looming above me, its face seizing, its open mouth a rictus that now took up half the doll’s head, and the fangs I had only noticed earlier that day were stained brown
(
Its talons were locked into the robe I’d passed out in and its wings were fanning themselves and it wasn’t the length of the wingspan that shocked me at that moment (it had grown—I accepted that within a second) but it was the wings webbed with black veins bulging tightly beneath the doll’s skin (
According to Robby, when he turned on the lamp the thing was motionless. And then it quickly rotated its head toward him—the wings were already outstretched, the mouth was already opening itself—and, when he spoke, the doll returned its focus on me.
I shouted out and knocked the thing off my chest as I bolted up.
The Terby fell to the floor and quickly clawed itself under the bed.
I stood up, panting, frantically brushing something nonexistent from my torn robe.
Except for the sounds I was making it was silent in the house.
But then I heard it too. The mewling.
